The Hitchhiking Robot Made Out Of A Bucket Is Already Halfway Across Canada

You gotta check out hitchBOT, a robot created by
researchers David Harris Smith and Frauke
Zeller that is literally hitchhiking across Canada,
dependent on nothing more (and nothing less!) than Canadian
kindness to go from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Victoria, British
Columbia.

CNN points out that since the robot was deposited street-side
at the end of July, it has already traversed roughly halfway
across Canada. It's been tweeting and Instagramming
the whole time as hosts take the gender-neutral robot on
adventures that slowly advance it across the continent. It's
visited places that vary from the Quebec
tourism center to a native
powwow in Wikwemikong.

The sci-fi paradigm is largely unchanged since people started
contemplating robots, with researchers pondering if we can
"trust" robots in the future. The hitchBOT experiment flips this
concept around — can robots trust humans to help them catch a
ride somewhere? If current progress is any indicator, it seems to
be a resounding yes.